( But you can watch too )
I have to squeeze out some bile, and unfortunately that means it’s going to splatter all over you, my wonderful audience. Please forgive me, it is so hateful, so cathartic, to encounter something which is so diametrically opposed to your own internal calculus that it seethes from your every pore like steam escaping a boiler on the cusp of exploding.
I am of course talking about Alakazam’s regular YouTube segment, The Act.
This post sat in my drafts for a year, because I needed to work through some thoughts, which I did in these three posts.
A number of people have brought the following recent article to my attention:
Magicians Less Prone To Mental Disorders Than Other Artists
Given that the Magic Circle has a whole mental health programme to look after its members mental health I can’t help but feel that suggesting magic is a ticket to good mental health might be papering over some actual problems, but that’s not what this is really about.
Because everyone knows to be an artist you have to be nuts, right? You have to be so tortured by the delusional visions visiting you at night that the only respite is to capture them on canvas or in writing. The music of the damned plays in your head until you can share it with other people to alleviate the burden of being alone with forbidden knowledge.
Right? That’s what we all know about being creative, its a curse.
Right?
Continue reading “Tortured Artists
or We don’t use that word here”
This post is kind of being rushed out to capture a mood from the most recent episode of the Disney Plus show Agatha All Along. This post contains spoilers about one episode’s minor plot point. It also contains minor spoilers for Back to the Future, The Time Travellers Wife, Shuffle and the ending of Derren Brown’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.
It also uncorks some deep feelings about showbiz which have nothing to do with any of that but we’ll get there later.
For those who don’t know, Agatha All Along is a TV spinoff from Wandavision, which itself is a TV spinoff from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, focusing on the characters of Wanda and Vision, both of whom were kind of side characters in other people’s movies. It’s a fringe on a fringe on a fringe and it’s only available on one highly specific streaming platform. It’s okay if you’ve never watched it, honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if you’d never heard of it. To top it all this entire artile spins off from a single episode, which is about a tertiary character in the main cast. Despite being about something brand spanking new, it may be even more niche than the usual references I drop to forgotten Sci-Fi channel miniseries and feature length independant experimental animations.
The show is about a bunch of witches who set out on a quest to blah blah, magic powers, dark pact, yawn. You’ve watched TV before. This particular episode however activated a very specific part of my brain. The part of my brain that loves time fuckery.